


fulcrum

by Emmar



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Fluff, Gen, Land of Waves Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 20:42:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7069222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emmar/pseuds/Emmar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>fulcrum: /ˈfʊlkrəm; ˈfʌl-/ noun. the pivot about which a lever turns.</p><p>the more things change, the more they stay the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fulcrum

It’s fine that none of the other kids want to play with him, Naruto thinks. He has Miku. She’s more than enough.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, polecat-shaped, curling around his neck and across his collarbones and ignoring the tears soaking into her fur. “We don’t need anyone else, anyway.”

—

Ren stays small, most of the time, a mouse or a sparrow or some other delicate thing, at least when they’re out in public. Ugh, Sakura can’t even imagine Sasuke-kun’s reaction if he were to see her daemon as something so awful and unladylike as a dog or a _boar_ or something.

—

People think Tsubame’s settled, that she’s been settled since— well, they think she has. She’s been a wildcat for years now, but she hasn’t settled. Sasuke just knows it, somehow.

He kind of wishes she’d change, sometimes, so people would stop looking at him like he’s mature for his age. The way they’d looked at _him_ , before.

—

It’s kind of hilarious how Team Seven split their time almost equally between trying to see what Kakashi looks like under his mask and what his daemon is. The speculation is that she’s a bug of some sort, or something else small, that she lives in one of Kakashi’s equipment pouches. When Kakashi relates this over drinks, Genma laughs so hard he’s almost sick and points a finger at where Kanae is sprawled along one side of their table, her head taking up Kakashi’s entire lap and spilling over onto Gai’s, where her ears are being rubbed.

“Do not forget,” Gai declares, his Youth utterly undiminished by the copious amounts of alcohol in his system, “that my Most Hip Eternal Rival and his ever-lovely companion are separated, my friend!”  
“ _Still!_ ” Genma protests, gesticulating wildly and sloshing beer all over the table. Kanae flicks one ear in irritation, and Kakashi smooths his hand across her skull whilst kicking the tokubetsu jounin in the shin and then offering up his most innocent expression.

His cute little genin keep on guessing and keep getting it wrong until Wave Country, when his eyes roll back in his head and he collapses not against the dirt path but a huge white wolf.

She’s inexplicably curled up against his side when he wakes, even though he’s pretty sure the bed is barely big enough for him.

“Hi,” he says, inanely, and she huffs and drops the full weight of her head onto his chest.  
“You’re an idiot,” she says, as though this is news to either of them.  
“So,” he tries after a moment, drawing the word out, “what have my adorable students had to say about you while I was out?”  
“Not much,” she admits, “even when they thought I was out of earshot. I guess they’re too awestruck.”  
“Or terrified,” he offers mildly, and she makes a thoughtful sound.  
“I’ll take it.”

—

“Kakashi-sensei’s daemon is _so cool_ ,” Naruto enthuses, the six of them crowded around Tsunami’s kitchen table.  
“She kind of is,” Sakura-chan admits, her Ren-kun rabbit-shaped in her lap.  
“ _Super_ cool,” Miku agrees, flitting around, bird and dog and hare and briefly a cat, nose-to-nose with the bastard’s Tsubame (she gives Miku a flat look of disdain, and turns her face away).  
“Hn,” is all the aforementioned bastard says, and Naruto wrinkles his nose.

“One of you should be patrolling,” says the subject of their conversation from the bedroom doorway, and Naruto freezes guiltily for all of a second before turning to her with a grin.  
“We wanted to make sure Kakashi-sensei was okay!”  
“That idiot’s fine, as usual, but it’s a good sentiment,” the big wolf says, padding further into the kitchen, and the chastised hunch of Sakura’s shoulders eases. “Uchiha-kun, if you and Tsubame-kun would patrol?”

Sasuke, wonder of wonders, just nods sharply and stands, and then him and Tsubame are out of the door.

“So, so,” Miku says, mimicking their sensei’s daemon’s shape, though her fur is a pale gold rather than the complete lack of colour the true article possesses. “What’s your name, wolf-sensei?”  
“Kanae,” she says, obviously amused, and nudges Miku hard enough with her snout to knock her over.  
“Kanae-san,” Sakura says, hesitant, and Ren flows up and across her shoulders as a mouse, then changes and perches, owl-shaped, “why haven’t we met you before?”  
“Kakashi and I are separated,” Kanae says easily, and Naruto feels sick, like that time he drank bad milk. She just put it out there, all casual, like it isn’t one of Naruto and Miku’s worst nightmares. One of her ears twitches, and she takes one huge step to nudge Miku in his direction. “It’s been a long time, and we chose it. It’d be kind of hard for him to take espionage or infiltration missions with me stuck to his side, and henge don’t hold well on daemons.”  
“Oh,” he says, and doesn’t even pretend he’s not grateful when his daemon bounds into his lap and lets her shaking hide his.  
“Are you giving away all my secrets?” says Kakashi-sensei, and Naruto looks up to see him leaning in the doorway, looking more or less like he always does, but… softer, kind of.  
“Maa,” Kanae replies, and Sakura muffles a snicker behind her hand, “as if I would.”  
“What did I do to deserve such a terrible daemon,” their teacher laments, one hand pressed melodramatically against his chest.  
“Do you really want me to answer that, Kakashi?”  
“Where’s my third adorable genin?” Sensei says, in the least subtle change of subject Naruto has _ever seen_.  
“Bastard’s patrolling,” Naruto reports and pulls his feet up onto his chair to avoid Sakura’s vicious retaliatory kick.  
“He has a name,” Kanae says mildly, and Naruto absolutely does not squirm at her tone. Nope. No way. “You ought to use it. You’re teammates, aren’t you?”  
“Sorry,” Miku mumbles, from where she’s wriggled up under Naruto’s t-shirt.  
“Sasuke-san and Tsubame-san went on patrol when Kanae-san asked them to,” Ren says, and Naruto startles, because he’s never heard Sakura’s daemon talk before. He hasn’t heard the bas— Sasuke’s, either, but he pretty much expects her to sound exactly like her human. Ren, on the other hand, sounds calm and soft and respectful, even if his voice sounds weird coming from an owl. It seems more like it would suit something… bigger. Meaner.  
“Well,” Kakashi-sensei says, and Naruto realises he’s leaning against Kanae without looking like he is at all, and that’s kind of impressive, “now I’m awake, Kanae can patrol, and I can teach you three something.”  
“Is it cool?” Miku demands, scrambling out of the neck of Naruto’s shirt as a snake and ignoring his squawk at her sudden chill.  
“Very cool,” he assures her, with the kind of deadpan tone that means he’s _definitely_ lying.

—

“Hey, hey, Ren-kun, you’re a _bear_!”

Ren blinks at her across their humans’ sleeping bodies, and it looks kind of weird when he’s so huge - he’s normally kind of tiny and fragile-looking. Miku likes him a lot more as a bear.

“You’re a fox,” he says, and Miku thinks about changing as hard as she can and then freezes.

She used to take a fox shape all the time when they were younger, but she hasn’t since Mizuki-bastard told her and Naruto what he has in him. She does one circuit, two, but obviously her tails move when she does, so she turns back to Ren and demands, “how many tails do I have?”  
“Three,” he says, non-plussed, and reaches out to put one huge paw on her head. “You okay?”  
“I have to tell you something,” she says in a rush, darting a look over her shoulder, “but you have to _promise_ you won’t tell Sakura-chan until I can get Naruto to tell her, okay?”  
“Is it dangerous? I won’t keep it from Sakura if it’s dangerous.”  
“…Only to me and Naruto,” she says eventually, and Ren nods.  
“Okay. Promise.”

She tells him.

—

Ren and Miku are being weirder than usual, but the weirdest thing, Tsubame notices, is that neither of their humans are. In fact, Naruto and Sakura look just as bewildered by their daemon’s moods as she feels.

That lasts about as long as it takes for all four of them to see her draped over Sasuke’s shoulders in Tsunami-san’s kitchen, huge and scaly.

“I thought you’d settled already,” Sakura says, tone flat with surprise, and Tsubame curls her tail around Sasuke’s arm and hums, only it comes out as a hiss now.  
“No,” is all she says, and ignores the twitch of Sasuke’s shoulders that serves as his laughter now.  
“You look smooth,” Miku says, her little pointed fox face peering up from the kitchen table. “Are you slimy? I always thought snakes were slimy.”  
“No,” she says again, and unwinds herself onto the table to press her flat nose against Miku’s shoulder.  
“Huh, cool! I guess I never noticed when I was being one.”

“It suits you,” Ren says after a long moment of silence, and Tsubame flicks her tail at him in acknowledgement. Bear-shape suits him, too - fierce. The shapes he used to take never seemed like they fit, too soft for a kunoichi. How was he supposed to protect anyone as a sparrow? But now… Yeah, now he’s right. Being a fox suits Miku, too - seems they’ve all settled true.

“Well,” says Kanae, lounging underneath the counter, “at least you’re all fit forms for travelling. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to carry a shark home.”

Kakashi just gives her a long look over the top of his ridiculous novel and then twitches in a way that might be construed as a nod, and she thinks he gets it. Sasuke might like to think that her settling as a snake means he’s cunning, but he’s forgetting that’s not the only thing snakes represent. His dream might be to kill Itachi and Suzume-nee, but hers is to restore her clan, and what better shape for rebirth than the ouroborous herself?

—

Kanae pauses at the back of the kids’ tent on her night patrol, listening to them speaking hushed over their humans’ sleeping forms, and she thinks, ah. Well, nothing to keep a team together like a shared secret.

“Tsubame and Ren know about the Kyuubi,” she says idly as she circles back to the smouldering embers of the fire, timing it just right and letting a spark of amusement curl in her as Kakashi snorts water out of his nose.

“Just Tsubame and Ren?” he manages, a moment later.  
“Seems like. Would explain why he and Miku were so twitchy these last few days. Reckon she’s trying to talk Naruto into telling the pups.”  
“Huh,” says Kakashi, getting to his feet slowly. “Well, it’ll make or break them.”  
“I know where I’d put my money,” she says, as he leans past the tent flap to shake Sakura awake for her watch.

—

“You’re hiding something from me,” Sakura says quietly, and Ren hunches as best he can, in this shape. “It’s okay,” she continues, “I know you wouldn’t if it wasn’t important.”

Except her definition of important and his have never quite lined up - Sasuke has been at the top of her priorities list for a long time, and while Ren doesn’t have a problem with Tsubame, it’s kind of difficult to decide if he _likes_ her or not when she hadn’t ever said two words to him before tonight, when Miku told her about Naruto’s prisoner. He thinks he likes her more than he likes Sasuke, though. She’d just nodded her big triangular head and agreed to keep the secret until Naruto chose to share it with her human, and then she’d curled up in a coil and tucked her head under the edge of Sasuke’s pillow and gone to sleep.

“Sorry,” he says to Sakura anyway, and she leans back against him in a way they’ve never been able to before, and he means it for more than keeping this secret.  
“I guess I had to stop pretending eventually,” she says, and then she sighs and gets up to walk the perimeter of camp.

—

“Ah, my Eternal Rival!”  
“Hmm?” Kakashi says as the door to the Hokage’s tower swings shut behind him, and Gai throws his arms in the air dramatically. “Did you hear something?”  
“As hip as ever!” he says, whilst Hikaru pads towards Kanae and leans up to touch their noses together, unnoticed. “I am here to commend you for your team’s youthful completion of their first C-rank! And I see that their companions have settled whilst you were away! Most impressive, young genin! Konoha is proud to have shinobi who burn so bright with the fire of youth!”  
“Maa, Team Seven, meet Maito Gai, the Beautiful Green Beast of Konoha. Gai, Team Seven.”

Kakashi’s genin are staring at him like they want to flee, but they just draw a half-step closer together. Youthful indeed. He likes them already.

**Author's Note:**

> Daemons!! I had a feel and so I wrote it.
> 
> \- Naruto's daemon, Miku, settles as a fox, because of course she does - and I do feel it fits Naruto's personality.  
> \- Sakura's Ren settles as a bear. Bears are notorious for protecting their young, and I felt that fit with Sakura. Also, she can't really pretend to be a perfect ladylike flower when her daemon is a big-ass bear.  
> \- Sasuke's Tsubame settles as a snake. Something big and possibly venomous, though a constrictor is a possibility. Snakes are indeed a symbol of fertility, rebirth, and healing.  
> \- Kakashi's Kanae is a wolf. A fuckin' huge wolf. She settled after Sakumo's suicide. The reasoning for her is similar to Ren re: protectiveness, but it also probably ties into wolves being the Hatake animal.  
> \- Gai's Hikaru is an ocelot. I don't have a real reason for this beyond wanting something 'dramatic, but also deadly.' House consensus was some kind of cat. I also like the idea of Gai having a fairly small, less obviously dangerous daemon than most, considering.
> 
> Ren means lotus, keeping with the flower theme, and Tsubame means swallow - Itachi's daemon Suzume's name means sparrow. Itachi means weasel and Sasuke squirrel, so their daemons got an animal theme too, though birds rather than mustelidae.
> 
> P.S.: Writing Gai is _so much fun,_ oh man.


End file.
